Contents

Settings

To insert space characters whenever the tab key is pressed, set the 'expandtab' option:

:set expandtab

With this option set, if you want to enter a real tab character use Ctrl-V<Tab> key sequence.

To control the number of space characters that will be inserted when the tab key is pressed, set the 'tabstop' option. For example, to insert 4 spaces for a tab, use:

:set tabstop=4

After the 'expandtab' option is set, all the new tab characters entered will be changed to spaces. This will not affect the existing tab characters. To change all the existing tab characters to match the current tab settings, use:

:retab

To change the number of space characters inserted for indentation, use the 'shiftwidth' option:

Adjusting indent

Since tabs effectively group spaces together, you may be tempted to work with tabs rather than spaces and change individual lines selectively. To easily change a tab-based indent to use spaces instead when 'noexpandtab' is set, you can temporarily set 'expandtab' and use :retab with a range. For example, to convert only the current line to use spaces, use :.retab.

However, Vim makes working with spaces for indentation just as easy as working with tabs. Just use the < and > operators to quickly indent/de-indent lines or visual selections.

If you're trying to figure out how it works and are confused by the <C-V><C-V><Tab> thing: <C-R>= asks for an expression, and the expression is entered as if it was typed, then the return value of the expression is inserted as if it too was typed - so, we want to insert <C-V><Tab>, but if we just entered that into the expression, it would be converted to <Tab> before the expression is executed - so, we have to enter <C-V><C-V><Tab> into the expression, which will be converted to <C-V><Tab> before the expression is executed, which will then become <Tab> in the actual file.

I also remapped Shift-Tab so I could easily insert real tabs at the beginning of the line when necessary: